Critic's Notebook; Classic Dramas Simmer in London's Summer Heat

The promising scent of snob appeal, as distinctive as the bouquet of brandy and cigars in a gentlemen's club, wafted from London's theater district as warm weather hit the city this year. Lined up to open, like so many leather-tooled editions of great books, were productions guaranteed to tantalize theatergoers for whom paradise is glamorous stars in serious classics.

Though they weren't really marketed in such terms (bad taste, you know), the implicit lure of these shows could be boiled down to the kinds of slogans that used to herald Important Actors in Dignified Films: Ralph Fiennes is ''Brand''! Natasha Richardson is ''The Lady From the Sea''! Patrick Stewart is ''The Master Builder''! And Joan Plowright, that grande dame of English theater, is Pirandello's ultimate mystery woman! And all as you've never seen them before!

Such prospects set my mouth watering as I prepared for a summer theater binge in London. For none of these plays are among the usual muscular war horses to which the artistically ambitious are so irresistibly drawn, the Hamlets and St. Joans and Vanyas. (I just missed a ''Three Sisters'' in which Kristin Scott Thomas was Masha, no doubt as you'd never seen her before.)

Ms. Richardson, Mr. Fiennes and Mr. Stewart were all appearing in Ibsen plays of notorious difficulty, seen only rarely in the West End and on Broadway. And Ms. Plowright, under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli, was taking on the central, enigmatic role in ''Absolutely! (Perhaps),'' Martin Sherman's new translation of a Rubik's cube of a comedy by Pirandello, hardly a common marquee name in mainstream productions these days.

Unfortunately great expectations, to filch a title from yet another classic, are made to be dashed. And what I had assumed would be the high points of the season turned out to be -- well, not exactly the nadirs but rather arid plateaus.

I was grateful for the chance to have seen all these plays in live performance. [Except for ''Lady From the Sea,'' they are all still running.] But of the four, only the Pirandello succeeded on its own terms, and those terms are writ in helium. The other, heftier productions were cautionary reminders of how hard it is to capture the essence of Ibsen's mystically fraught, aspiring masters of the universe, even in the able and charismatic hands of stars like Ms. Richardson, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Fiennes.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of ''Brand,'' directed by Adrian Noble at the Haymarket Theater, has sent some audience members running and gasping for the exits at intermission. Though the production was, among the Ibsen productions I saw, the truest to its author's vision -- you could even say that Mr. Fiennes indeed is Brand -- you can understand the impulse to bolt. This portrait of an arrogant, self-ordained priest in rural, snow-bound Norway is, as they say, heavy sledding, a relentless study in relentlessness.

The play that clinched Ibsen's reputation as his generation's leading playwright-provocateur when it was published in 1866, this long, lugubrious drama in verse was written to be read. (The three hours of Michael Meyer's condensed translation take up less than half the time a staging of the full text would require.) After all, it portrays events like a tempest-tossed boat voyage and a climactic avalanche that gives new meaning to bringing down the house.

Mr. Noble firmly resists spectacle, creating instead a production as austere and forbidding as its uncompromising title character, a man who refuses to live, as he puts it, by half measures. Peter McKintosh's weathered wooden set disdains color and flourishes.

So, it might be added, does Mr. Fiennes's performance, which is in the mold of the scowling, masochistic pensiveness he perfected in films like ''The English Patient'' and ''The End of the Affair.'' Without cinematic close-ups, Mr. Fiennes's substantial presence becomes monolithic.

This means there is little emotional variety here, even as the tragedies mount, including the deaths of Brand's infant son and long-suffering wife (played as a flickering human candle by the luminous Claire Price). ''Why must you be so hard?'' Brand is asked repeatedly. The same question could be posed of Mr. Noble's production. But hardness, if uncomfortable, is not in this instance inappropriate.

At the newly (and beautifully) restored Almeida Theater in Islington, ''The Lady From the Sea'' found Ms. Richardson in a state of unvaried intensity that rivaled that of Mr. Fiennes. Written between ''A Doll's House'' and ''Hedda Gabler,'' this curious, lyrical drama of 1888 portrays yet another Ibsen heroine who feels confined by marriage, but with an added veil of mysticism.

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Ellida, the wife of a much older doctor, is tormented by fantasies of escape to the sea, which she believes is her natural element. This otherworldly role has traditionally been hard to cast, though it has been turned into personal triumphs by transcendent stars like Eleonora Duse and Vanessa Redgrave, Ms. Richardson's mother.

Under the direction of the omnipresent Trevor Nunn, the improbably ingénuelike Ms. Richardson is unstintingly tearful and tremulous, and her perfectly trained voice hits emotional notes with resonance. Yet there's a girlishness about this Ellida that robs her of mystery. Her hair wet and feet bare in the opening scene, she seems as vulnerable and unwitting as a baby seal.

If Ms. Richardson, a first-class actress, hasn't yet found the key to Ellida, many of the supporting cast members reminded you that Ibsen was as expert a portraitist of mediocrity as of the tormented genius. This was especially true of Tim McInnerny as Ellida's former suitor and of Claudie Blakley as her stepdaughter. Their scenes together were exquisitely awkward studies in loneliness and resignation, recalling that at moments Ibsen can be surprisingly close to Chekhov.

Such elegiac understatement is not a hallmark of Anthony Page's production of ''The Master Builder'' (1891) at the Albery Theater. Mr. Page, the director of the dazzling ''Doll's House'' with Janet McTeer, here keeps everything at such a high pitch of hysteria that you start to feel giggly.

In the title role of the hubristic builder Solness, Ibsen's most directly autobiographical character, Mr. Stewart seems either languidly worldly or overwrought. It's an atypically disjunctive performance, which isn't helped by the exaggerated breathlessness of Lisa Dillon as Hilda Wangel, the fierce embodiment of a brave new generation, who throws herself upon Solness.

Hilda is meant to be Solness's dangerous, God-defying soul mate, but here she comes across as an unhinged, ineffectual stalker. The audience laughs every time Hilda, with panting prurience, expresses interest in the master builder's ''terribly high,'' unquestionably phallic towers. Since Solness's wife (Sue Johnston) is also a twanging bundle of nerves, you can understand why the master builder would be compelled to jump off one of those really tall towers.

If ''The Master Builder'' inadvertently registers as a bizarre comedy of manners, ''Absolutely! (Perhaps)'' at Wyndhams Theater consciously and comfortably fits the same description. A play in which gossip becomes a means of measuring the elusiveness of human personality, it is a far lighter slice of Pirandello than the work for which he is best known, ''Six Characters in Search of an Author.''

Mr. Zeffirelli, celebrated for his opulent productions of opera, keeps things appropriately intimate here, though you can detect his sensibility in his gaudy patchwork design for the set, a Roman apartment. And he brings a cocktail-party bounciness to the characters' debates on the nature of reality as they consider the strange triangular relationship that centers on the woman next door.

That woman is portrayed by Ms. Plowright, whose majestically understated performance manages to make her character seem both cryptic and quotidian, serene and disturbed. But as the play delves into its deep philosophical questions, the whole enterprise brings to mind a mildly diverting parlor game, forgotten as soon as it's over.

When this play was first performed in 1917, it so exasperated some audience members that one of them threw his chair at the stage. Now it seems like perfect matinee fare for the same of sort of theatergoers who flocked to Yasmina Reza's ''Art.'' Compared with the icy and treacherous waters of Ibsen, Mr. Zeffirelli's take on Pirandello's intellectual conundrums feels as soothing as a lukewarm bath.